Educator develops lesson plan on 9/11, Pearl Harbor parallels
Albert Robertson was a high school senior when terrorists commandeered four American jets on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and took aim at four iconic American landmarks.
Robertson, now the assistant principal at an elementary school in Lexington, S.C., was sitting in English class when news reports of the first strike landed on the classroom TV screen.
“I saw the event unfolding, but it was really difficult to understand it,” he said.
Years later, when he was teaching social studies and serving on a committee working to develop primary source sets for the Digital Public Library of America, he was tasked with creating a set focused on World War II.
“As a social studies teacher, I’ve always been interested in continuity and change,” he said. “No matter what time period it is, you can look at how things are similar and how they are different.”
The group’s conversation eventually veered toward more contemporary events in American history, and that led to Sept. 11, 2001.
“When we talked about 9/11,” Robertson said, “we drew parallels with Pearl Harbor.”
That resulted in a primary source set titled “Attacks on American Soil: Pearl Harbor and September 11,” which can be found on the Digital Public Library of America website.
The educational element contains discussion questions that teachers can use as part of a teaching guide, a set of primary sources including President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Day of Infamy” speech, delivered Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Japan’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, and President George W. Bush’s address to the nation on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.
Other source material includes posters, propaganda and photographs from both eras. Additional resources include man-on-the-street interviews that were done in the days following the Pearl Harbor attack and preserved on tape for the Library of Congress, a Sept. 11 digital archive and materials from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
The man-on-the-street interviews from Dec. 8, 1941, are particularly telling, given they represent the raw thoughts of people who had just learned the nation had been attacked.
Robertson was years away from being born when the Japanese attacked that day, but he was well aware when the terrorists attacked New York and Washington and attempted to hit another target in the nation’s capital, believed to be either the Capitol building or the White House.
“We were trying to rationalize it,” Robertson said of the Sept. 11 attacks. “The first plane that hit, we were thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s a mistake.’ Then we watched the second plane hit. We were in North Augusta, S.C., and there’s a huge nuclear facility nearby. We thought we might be the next target.”
The differences and similarities between Sept. 11 and Pearl Harbor are many. One big difference was that in the case of Pearl Harbor, it was no secret as to who was responsible — and that enabled people to “get through the steps of grief much faster,” as Robertson put it.
“We knew who the enemy was,” he said, referring to the Japanese, who had been “negotiating” a peace settlement for the Pacific region with the U.S. government all while planning the deadly attack.
“We knew they were trying to suck us into the war and Pearl Harbor was the culmination of their planning. When they finally hit us where it hurt, the reaction was, ‘Let’s hit them back.’”
With Sept. 11, things were different. “We didn’t speak right away of ‘I’m going to go fight this,’” Robertson said. “We were trying to figure out what nation was responsible for this. We thought it was somewhere in the Middle East. But we really didn’t know who the enemy was. It was our own airplanes. We had to figure this out before we could go after them vs. ‘we know who the enemy is and we’re going after them tomorrow.’”
Emotionally, Robertson said, people’s reactions to the two attacks were similar. “Everyone saw 9/11 on TV,” he said. “Pearl Harbor we learned about through a different mode of communication. But in both cases, word-of-mouth spread quickly. And there was a resurgence of patriotism that happened after both events.”
